Author: Brian

The basic makeup of inner life varies substantially from person to person.

Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains.

But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?

Dr. Russel Hurlburt:

My research says that there are a lot of people who don’t ever naturally form images, and then there are other people who form very florid, high-fidelity, Technicolor, moving images.

Some people have inner lives dominated by speech, body sensations or emotions, and yet others by ‘unsymbolized thinking’ that can take the form of wordless questions such as, “Should I have the ham sandwich or the roast beef?”

Inner speakers tend to be more confident, for example, and those who think in pictures tend to have trouble empathizing with others.

Maybe it’s a defensive maneuver on my part, but my rationale is that I don’t want to infect myself with some theory about how the world is. I would like to see the way the world is without having a theory about it.

You know that supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park?

It descends 500 miles below the town of Wisdom, Montana. travels an inch a year to the northeast, and possibly reaches all the way to the Earth’s core.

It’s tilted because the Earth’s mantle is moving. Like smoke in the wind, the hot material is caught in an eastward mantle “breeze” that moves two inches a year.

Yellowstone blows about every 650,000 years. There’s been three giant eruptions – two million years, 1.3 million and 640,000 years ago – plus many eruptions much bigger than Mount St. Helens. The next event would bury much of the West in ash.

Readable article at Jackson Hole News and another at The Salt Lake Tribune. National Geographic offers a virtual dive down Yellowstone’s plume. Hat tip to MIT Science Tracker

Interview: Professor Robert Smith at NPR.

Abstract: “Geodynamics of the Yellowstone hotspot and mantle plume: Seismic and GPS imaging, kinematics, and mantle flow”

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” – Oscar Wilde

The Economist: Three hundred million niches.

America is a uniquely attractive place to live: a lifestyle superpower.

Because America is so big and diverse, immigrants have an incredible array of choices. The proportion of Americans who are foreign-born, at 13%, is higher than the rich-country average of 8.4%. In absolute terms, the gulf is much wider. America’s foreign-born population of 38m is nearly four times larger than those of Russia or Germany, the nearest contenders. It dwarfs the number of migrants in Japan (below 2m) or China (under 1m). The recession has dramatically slowed the influx of immigrants and prompted quite a few to move back to Mexico. But the economy will eventually recover and the influx will resume.

Economic growth depends on productivity, and the most productive people are often the most mobile. A quarter of America’s engineering and technology firms founded between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder…

Kedrosky and Feld, Wall Street Journal:

Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.

The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.

Of course, there were warning signs: Osama banned fridges and air-conditioning. Jokes and toys were forbidden. Omar’s childhood was marked by regular beatings and survivalist training; the army of ruffians and retainers who called his father “Prince”; and that mullah who had given his father an entire mountain in Tora Bora.

Omar bin Laden – fourth son turned peace-loving refusenik of Osama – is reliant on the good graces of a number of easily offended people. The person he can afford to offend, doing so with intelligence and insight, is his father.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director, International Monetary Fund:

In the annals of economic crises then, where do we find ourselves?

Indeed, the work needed to build a more robust, stable, and safe global financial system has only just begun.

Remember, economic stability lays the groundwork for peace, while peace is a necessary precondition for trade and sustained economic growth.

What needs to be done? Global economic governance, including at the IMF, must be reformed to reflect the realities of the current era, and global financial-sector supervision and regulation need to be strengthened.

Simon Johnson:

The details will turn your stomach. The arrogance, lack of self-awareness, and overweening pride are astonishing.

They won:

The Wall Street executives kept their jobs, their bonuses and their pensions; they benefited from unprecedented rule changes and unlimited monetary and fiscal support; and their firms became even bigger and more dangerous to the economic health of society.

NASA’s AIRS project… the transport of carbon dioxide around the world… the data have shown that, contrary to prior assumptions, carbon dioxide is not well mixed in the troposphere, but is rather “lumpy.”

AIRS data reveal a never-before-seen belt of carbon dioxide that circles the globe. More carbon dioxide is emitted in the heavily populated northern hemisphere than in the southern. As a result, the south is a recipient, or sink, for carbon dioxide from the north.

Several graphics and animations help bring ‘feel’ to the numbers.

Gallup Christmas Poll:

The number who believe religion is out of date and has no answers for today’s problems has jumped to 29%.

The number with no religious preference has grown from a level of around 8% to 13%.

The number for whom religion is not very important has climbed from just over 10% to 19%.

Most of these changes occurred during the Bush years, since 2000.

“It is the largest thing we have ever built, and we have assembled it from transistors—the smallest things we know how to make.

“It is a chrysalis we are forming around the planet…a table where we sit to gossip, a suq where we buy and sell; a shadowy corner for planning mischief; a library holding the entire world’s information; a friend, a game, a matchmaker, a psychiatrist, an erotic dream, a babysitter, a teacher, a spy….

The best and worst and most ordinary of us reflected—and perhaps distorted—in a silvery fog of bits.” via humorzo

Conservatives are a bunch of Hummer-driving, meat-eating, gun-toting, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white- thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally hypocritical blowhards.

Liberals are a bunch of hybrid-driving, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, whale-saving, sandal-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, namby-pamby bed wetters.

Jonathan Haidt and his University of Virginia colleague Jesse Graham surveyed the moral opinions of more than 110,000 people from dozens of countries and have found why liberals and conservatives differ.

Liberals can feel the pain of others, giving rise to the virtues of kindness, gentleness and nurturance, a reciprocal altruism, fairness, a sense of justice.

Conservatives tend toward tribalism, patriotism, authority, respect, tradition, hierarchical social structures, and disgust related to disease and contamination of bodily purity.

Deric Bownds suggests you can take the survey yourself.

How do human beings decide when to be selfish or selfless?

The Center for Neuroeconomics Studies:

We gave testosterone to 25 men who then became 27% less generous towards strangers….

We also found that men with elevated testosterone were more likely to use their own money punish those who were ungenerous toward them.

We conclude that elevated testosterone causes men to behave antisocially.

“We’re a nation of people working harder and harder for less and less, and the merest suggestion that we should do anything other than work 9 hour days without pause until we drop dead is met with cries of socialism and accusations of malingering.”

Ed says, “We work too goddamn much in this country, and whether it’s for Christmas or Zoroastrian New Year it would be nice if our ruling class would grant us a few days to see our families or, you know, enjoy our lives.

“As most of us are painfully aware, employers are not required to provide paid vacation in this country. And contrary to popular belief, they are not required to give you time off, either paid or unpaid, for Federal holidays.

“It truly is depressing to see how we stack up to our cousins across the Atlantic or to the south.”

The market is your God, and you shall put no other value before the market. If that means children starve, God gave us free will precisely so we can follow the market and watch children starve.

Jonathan Chait on Republican Nihilism:

The question isn’t whether the Republican Party has any ideas. The question is whether the party has any relevant ideas.

Read about the history of conservatives opposing insane progressive ideas, such as women’s suffrage and child labor laws.)

“Woman suffrage would give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich. Meantime these new voters would become either the purchased or cajoled victims of plausible political manipulators, or the intimidated and helpless voting vassals of imperious employers.” —Former Republican President Grover Cleveland

Endless right-wing visions of apocalypse…

Whence the Deficit? by James Kwak.
“When told that the recent change in our overall debt position is primarily due to lower tax revenues, not higher spending, even some people who really should know better are surprised.

“Many will be surprised to learn that our trillion-dollar deficits are not due to increased spending under the Obama administration, and that the stimulus spending dwindles away quickly.

“And where’s health care? It’s not there because it isn’t in the CBO’s baseline projections yet, but in any case the CBO projects it as net deficit-reducing over ten years (and beyond, for the Senate bill).”

Republicans backed by business will blame Obama. Electioneering requires no truth.

Kleptocracy in America?

…most successful modern societies are, in fact, kleptocracies. The key is to gain popular support in order to re-distribute as much wealth to the ruling class as the populace will support.

Edward Harrison says, “Not only is the freshwater view of rational economic agents and efficiency completely ignorant of the role of fairness, it also disregards the very real tendency for power to consolidate over time and to lead to crony capitalism. This is what I refer to as “deregulation as crony capitalism.” I see it as central to the causes of the crisis.”

Appropriately, Japanese toymaker Bandai sells 100-dollar Ben Franklins that dissolve in water. A pack of 10 notes is a steal at only 250 yen ($3.90).

Slate’s Daniel Gross asks, “If billionaires don’t feel guilty about walking away from their debts, should homeowners?”

Companies strategically default all the time.

Mark Lynas:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.

Scathing.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives.

On the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment.

On turning away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.

Michael Specter, science writer for the New Yorker, says, “Denialism is a virus, and viruses are contagious. As Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress.

“Well, progress has always been this thing that we strive for and I think we should strive for it. However, it’s been sort of blindly seen as good and I think that we have come to realize that, pretty much since the 1950s, the idea of shimmering progress, of success in technology, success from medicine — though we’ve had a lot of success, we’ve also had some pretty famous failures.

“It makes people think: Why are you promising us that you’re curing cancer, you’re fixing the environment, you’re giving us healthy food, when in fact that’s kind of untrue? That is one reason why denialism is allowed to breed: because people look at authority figures, at scientists, at government and they say, ‘You lied’.”

Yet the NY Times seeks to comfort us by asserting:

“…for better or worse, people are more skeptical of authority than they used to be and want to think for themselves, which includes grappling with the minutiae of science. Not so long ago, for example, patients rarely questioned doctors before undergoing surgery or taking their pills (for example, estrogen replacement therapy to prevent heart attacks), a blind obedience to authority that arguably cost many more lives than, say, vaccine refusal does now.

“What we are seeing is the democratization of science, not the rise of denialism.”

Sarah Palin told ‘biggest lie of the year’

Harvard Magazine:

Using mice that have been surgically joined so that their bloodstreams become shared, Amy Wagers investigated whether the blood of a young animal might awaken the muscle stem cells in an old one and enhance muscle repair.

…when a young and an old mouse were joined, and a leg of the old mouse was injured, the healing was rapid: new muscle formed almost as well as in a young animal.

Something from the young mouse—an unknown factor circulating in the blood—was reaching muscle stem cells in the old mouse and turning on the biological machinery of repair.

…the reactionary Bush era was just the worst of times.

I declare it the decade of the American oligarchs.

Juan Cole:

We have always had robber barons in American politics, but the Neoliberal moment created a new social class. At about 1.3 million adults, it is not too large to have some cohesive interests, and its corporations, lobbyists, and other institutions allow it to intervene systematically in politics.

It owns 45 percent of the privately held wealth and is heading toward 50….

Much like a tightly wound drum, red blood cells are in perpetual vibration.

Vibrations help the cells maintain their flattened oval or disc shape, which is critical to their ability to deform as they traverse blood vessels in the body to deliver oxygen to tissues.

Understanding the vibrations could help develop treatments for malaria, sickle cell anemia and spherocytosis.

The vibrations are nearly impossible to study because their amplitude is so tiny (nanometer, or billionth of a meter, scale), and they occur in just milliseconds.

Clean Water.

Cheney & Bush:

Between 2002 and 2008, the amount spent on government contracts more than doubled. The amount spent on no-bid, non-competitive contracts jumped by 129 percent. [link]

Google announces here that Google Scholar has added full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts.

For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow — or make effective arguments to change.

New Scientist:

Sugar-free sweeteners might fool your taste buds, but your brain knows better.

Sugar-free sweeteners activate brain areas that register pleasant taste, but not strongly enough to cause satiation. “That might drive you to eat something sweet or something calorific later on.”

Even as manufacturers get better at blending these agents to avoid peculiar tastes, their ability to help us cut down on calories and keep our weight in check is coming into question. A handful of studies, starting in the 1980s, suggested that regular use of artificial sweeteners might even make people eat more, rather than less, by stimulating their appetites without satisfying them.